Markaudio-Sota Tozzi Two standmount loudspeaker

A small loudspeaker has the advantage of being almost a point source. It’s one of the great advantages the UK audio industry exploited to its fullest extent from the 1960s onwards. But there’s a great distinction between ‘almost’ a point source and a true point source, and that’s where the Markaudio-Sota Tozzi Two comes in. This is a genune point-source in its truest sense, because it’s perhaps the simplest loudspeaker Hi-Fi+ has reviewed in years. It shares many basic concepts with loudspeakers from Eclipse, in terms of size and number of drive units per channel, but the two diverge rapidly beyond that point. Of course, the cabinets differ pretty substantially, too.

The Tozzi Two is a small, light, rear-ported box loudspeaker, designed to be used in very near-field applications, such as on the desktop or in a tiny room. Basically, if they are close enough to touch from the listening position, that’s about right. The front baffle is slightly larger than the rear, creating a natural backwards tilt when the Tozzi Two is on that aforementioned desktop, and this angles the loudspeaker cones almost perfectly at seated ear height. Making the Tozzi Two potentially a fine computer speaker.

The rear ported cabinet isn’t breaking new ground (with one notable exception), but the single-wired Tozzi Two is every bit a form-follows-function design. That notable exception is on the baseplate, where at the bottom dead centre of the design is a small hole. This is designed to take a 1/4-20 UNC thread, the kind of screw-thread that is used extensively in photography and musical instrument stand design. In other words, if you have a small lighting stand, photo tripod, or microphone stand, you just got a loudspeaker stand. Given you can buy lightweight lighting stands from Amazon for less than £15, and microphone stands are sometimes even less, you are not going to be spending big on accessories.